It baffles me that someone would boost their own post if they don't want someone to notice it.
I like Mastodon. A lot! But battling the platform to build a cross-server network isn't antithetical to decentralisation. Separate But able to talk to each other seems like a good idea?
Have I just misunderstood Mastodon completely and I should take myself off to dice.camp and ignore the fact that I'm a person with other interests?
Let's say that you have concerns about Mastodon and the greater Fediverse and those are good faith concerns. What does it mean
Note: I don't give a fig about Activity down the Pub, that is a means to an end. Means to an end can and should be replaced when they become irrelevant. If you're knife breaks you can repair or replace it etc, but your need to cut things remains.
By comparison, we have a social network. Like a net it has nodes (clumps of people) and connections 1/N
I call the connections between these nodes "horizontal" (because I, a simple person, envisage this as a 2 dimensional grid, like a net). The nodes are also bound together and these I call "vertical". For the avoidance of doubt, the Horizontal stream is your friends list and the vertical connection is your local feed in this analogy. I, and you reading this, occupy points on these nodes. If we fold the net over and rub it past itself then the moments 2/T
Where the "federated feed" happens is where nodes and connections go past us in a jumble.
"Yes, yes, PJ this is all very obvious, what of it?"
Well, now that you have a metaphor to think about what's going on then I shall explain.
This description describes a social network. A centralised social network (CSN) is essentially a big node which consists of everyone crammed in together and at any point you can become in contact with any other point. There is weak vertical integration because 3/T
Your node is unimportant. What is important is your personal horizontal integration, the people that you talk to.
The problem is, is that these CSN are inherently vulnerable to being owned by actors inimical to our happiness and peace of mind. There is but one node and he who controls the node controls who may have access and who does not. It is a vigorously anti democratic but pro- social model.
A network where there are gaps between the nodes is a decentralised social network (DSN) 4/T
In a DSN the separation of the nodes is a two edged sword.
Let's zoom in on Mastodon rather than the greater Fediverse to see what I mean:
The vertical integration of a node is how integrated the people on a server are. Do they want to talk to each other? Are they neighbours or are they random strangers passing by like in a busy metropolitan transit station?
The people that you see locally can very much change your experience. If all you see is random faces with no coherence or theme 5/T
Than you believe that you are on a Twitter replacement. Except that it's rubbish compared to Twitter because the news is not what you're accustomed to, you have no agency to find out things because you have to sacrifice a goat before you may search for something etc.
You complain about this perceived inferiority and are told go back to Twitter or find another server. More likely than not you accept that you don't belong and leave. This is a normal mastodon.social experience. But 6/T
You can find others that you enjoy talking to which leads to intraserver (vertical) integration and from this meet people from other servers which is horizontal integration.
You then realise that non-giant nodes are interesting places with their own distinct characters and cultures and hip servers.
you roll your eyes, stifling a yawn 🥱 "so what PJ?"
So currently the major political, unexpressed, trends in Mastodon are about the following:
Rightly perceived as threatening because it's a ball of yarn which is so large that it threatens to tangle up the whole network of the Mastodon+ social network (you're on calckey? Glad for you, didn't ask, not relevant, you're the +.)
A lot of these people are fine but if only 1% are awful out of a billion people that's 10 million awful people to deal with. This network is growing by about 150,000 per month. The threads of Meta will probably start small say a 1,000,000 people. That's a lot 8/T
If you were a real Mastodon+ user you have realised that Mastodon runs and operates on hashtags.
If you choose to not use them then your comments are not as visible as they could be and you're just pissing in the wind because they'll only appear in the federated/local feeds where someone might stumble across them :/
